Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

It had been both a provocation and a debasement: What was he worth? Or rather, a way of saying to his father: Without you, I have no worth.

Or maybe it had just been an attempt at truth.

But he was not a nothing now; after his brother had valiantly failed to survive the American invasion, Ayad had become his family’s oldest living male, and thus the steward of his mother’s land, and Raheem was something other than the man who fixed his father’s SLE. If not a criminal, then, as a Shi’ite, a man known to have connections, the possessor of a new and undefined authority. The blue sedan that the intruders had been driving when they’d arrived at Ayad’s house — it had taken him some time to place it, but Ayad was fairly sure he’d seen it before, parked in Raheem’s lot out back.

When he thought that Raheem had been on the phone long enough, he pounded on the bell that the garage owner kept hidden, out of reach, atop his desk. Raheem deliberately — Ayad was familiar with his habit — refused to even budge the sallow curve of his shin as it stuck out across the rear doorway.

Where is this problem with the dog? Raheem’s note read when it came back.

This dog wants your friends’ gift , he wrote. This night, every night . He drew a picture of a dog digging a hole under the moon, surrounded by stalks of wheat.

* * *

He slept in the living room of the main house. His only means of communication, the only way he had to confirm his continued existence, was the cell phone his mother had left for him. It was a long, skinny silver Nokia that resembled one of his father’s shoehorns. It could text in Arabic but the phone’s system of having to push a button one, two, or three times just to summon up a letter of an alphabet made his own true desires, the things he really would have liked to say to his mother— I’m afraid or How long does it take a body to decompose? — seem even more impossible to communicate. However, he discovered that if he put it on speaker, he could hold the phone in his palm and feel her voice vibrating. Who knew what the hell she was saying? He’d walk the house, sit down at her dresser, stand in his father’s closet (the clothes were all still there, his city shoes nicked at the heels), pace out front on one of the no-electricity nights, feeling that great swallowing dark coming on, while her voice buzzed away there in his palm. He could get a fair amount of information from the vibrations: the quick prickling of worry, a buzzing jagged reverb of a rant, the longer, silkier passages when she cried. (Or at least he could imagine these things, which was probably better than understanding what his mother actually had to say.) Mostly, he understood that she was claiming him. They had never gotten along well, but now, at noon and again at six, she’d call and talk to him for a good ten or fifteen minutes that were always surprisingly emotional and satisfying for him. And then he’d lift the headset up and make his own barfing donkey noise into it (this was how Faisal had described his voice after Ayad had once written, Seriously, how do I sound? ), and that was the signal to hang up.

When he woke, a pale blue-gray light was swimming around the walls, over the furniture. At first Ayad thought he was doing this by himself, beaming the image in out of the past, but he realized that some of the shadow bars that spun, flickered, and recycled over the bare walls were coming from outside. And when he went to the door, he saw the cars of the — what should he call them? insurgents? takfiri ? — curving around through the side yard, heading back out onto the road through the front gate, having solved his dog problem. And probably also mined the field.

That morning, the dog returned — not to the field but to the old incinerator where he’d been dumping his trash. He noticed a flash of movement just outside the back gate. He walked down through the garden, peeked over the gate, saw the dog limping and whining over the trash, then returned to the kitchen, opened a can of chickpeas (there were fifty such cans, part of his mother’s supply stash, shipped in before the roads got bad), carried them back outside, and dumped them in the dirt — a large pile just at the spot where the spacing between the gate bottom and the foot-worn path was the largest. Then little dribs and drabs leading in. At the door to his father’s workshop, he left a second can, open but untouched, then returned to the house and the TV.

* * *

His mother’s family had owned the field. When he was twelve or thirteen, Ayad had been astonished to find this out. It was also his mother’s family who’d had the money, the land, the prestige that had allowed her to maintain the (in his view) illusory sense that such a thing as stability was to be expected in the first place. This traced clear back to pre — Ba’ath Party times — or to, as his mother insisted, dangerous-to-mention original Ba’ath Party times — a time that seemed to Ayad distant and historical, though he could tell from his mother’s ferociously maintained and guarded scrapbooks it was the Polaroid-engulfed, thickly emulsed 1950s. The friendship then had been with Hassan al-Bakr; that was the man whom he’d seen pictures of, sitting in their side yard eating pickled cauliflower, surrounded by his mother’s (then his grandmother’s) roses and gardenias. And, if you wanted to look at the under-the-bed and inside-the-mattress albums, you could find a photo or two of good old Nuri al-Said.

Whomever it belonged to, the dog had no interest in going back out into the field. He’d tried to lead it out the back gate a few times — this was after he’d gotten a collar on it and manufactured a leash out of some hammock chain — and the dog kept doing this insane, maddening thing of sitting down on its rear end and ducking its head.

So, instead, he had to walk the dog down the fairly abandoned, half-paved, half-dusted-over road outside his house. A lonely line of two-strand phone poles echoed the road above their head. You want to talk about boring? Try taking this landscape seriously after you’ve spent half an hour watching a DVD of Beverly Hills Cop with your neighbor Faisal Amar. Or Independence Day . Or Sex and the City . No subtitles needed for that. In the past, Ayad had been big on backgrounds, big on the space and feel of other countries, had often walked this road without seeing it at all, head filled with nostalgia for places he’d never been. But now that same yearning pull applied to the road itself, or at least the road as he remembered it. For instance, the small grove of olive and eucalyptus trees just across from the doctor’s old place. His family had picnicked here. Horrible, boring, two-bit afternoons, as he’d seen them. A couple plastic chairs, dust-covered bowl of hummus, better replaced by Central Park, or the Vegas Strip. But now when he unfolded his imagination amid the polite churning dapple of its leaves, it was to reassemble the full complement of his family, all together, and bitching less than was strictly accurate. This particular afternoon, he’d been remembering a yellow ball he’d juggled here during a family outing, its surface the perfect combination of soft and sticky. He had caught the ball between a bare, upturned toe and his shin, and hopped on his left foot to show his father — he’d been so desperate for his father’s praise back then — and just as he made a ghost of this same turn, he saw the dog running toward him.

The thing he hated, feared, despised, loathed about his deafness was his vulnerability. But in this case, the dog’s approach gave him enough time to crouch, catch a glimpse of the oncoming convoy, and then scuttle away into thicker brush so that when the American Humvees blasted by at a hundred kilometers per hour, pushing a hot, dry wind and filling the grove with its dust, he was safely hidden. The dog lay beside him, chin upon her doubled paws, a comically flat deadpan quality to her black-brown eyes as she followed the trucks and then swiveled over to look at him — no change in expression, no movement other than the eyes — as if to say, What the fuck? And then she was gone, bolting down the road after the convoy, which was not what he’d expected, quite honestly. He half ran, half walked after her, keeping to the tree line, since, if there was one thing you could say about the Americans, they had good signage: